Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco; Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs by Thomas A.

Sebeok
Review by: W. C. Watt
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 714-716
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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714 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
state of the art. Whereas biologists routinely
consider the condition of taxonomy in their
specialties a significant professionalresponsibili-
ty, linguists rarely give it high priority. The only
instance I recall of a taxonomic revision of a
group of languages in the spirit that biologists
regularly bring to such tasks is in Gerard's
Proto- Takanan Phonology.
Valuable results of taxonomic rethinking
have appeared in volumes of Current Trends in
Linguistics and were largely utilized by the
Voegelins (e.g., West Atlantic and Gur). For
much of the world, however, piecemeal sug-
gested improvements in classification leave the
larger picture still unclear, so that, understand-
ably, the present volume relies on older systems
that do provide general coverage, even though
many scholars find them unsatisfactory.
The loudest complaints may well concern the
large, well known Bantu family. There the book
follows the often typological taxonomy of Guth-
rie, who alleges in The Classification of the Ban-
tu Languages that, "true historical study" of
them "is impossible." Furthermore, Bantuists
are extreme splitters, even redefining terms, so
that, as Doke put it in the The Southern Bantu
Languages, " 'group' indicates an aggregation
of languages . . . members can, without serious
difficulty, converse with one another." The 439
Bantu Proper listings are thus not comparable
with most under other headings. Until, how-
ever, a scholar hewing closer to the proclivities
of the traditional Indo-Europeanistsundertakes
to account for the whole of Bantu, prospects for
improvement are dim.
The difficulties posed by conflicting
authorities are pointedly clear for Tibeto-
Burman. Classzfication ordinarily follows
Konow with indications of alternative groupings
after Shafer, but page 328 warns that the
"classificationis open to critical question" based
on the 1972 work of Benedict. Actually, his not
fully detailed taxonomy in Sino-Tibetan: A
Conspectus contradicts much in the earlier
ones.
The same group illustrates the difficulties of
full coverage. As an experiment, I searched the
Voegelins' index for Tibeto-Burman categories
in the 1971 census of India (a source that might
incite an ordinary user to look here). Seventy-
three over-5,000-speaker listings yielded no ap-
parent entry for 19 (although anyone inured to
the vagaries of language names would find
Lotha as Hlota, Mogh as Maghi). Perhaps more
seriously, four groups named in Chinese and
Russian sources are missing. Proliferation of
language designations is mainly to blame, and
inconsistent use of the same term for dialect,
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[80, 1978]
language, or group of related languages com-
pounds our problems.
There is, alas, no ready route to a standard-
ized nomenclature. The biologists' priority rule
would produce absurdities- exacerbated by the
initial reporting of groups under nasty names
bestowed by neighbors. Self-designations are
often inconsistent, and also often shared by
more than one language in the same region.
The book's speaker-counts helpfully provide
general indications of the comparative size of
many languages, although most have been
outstripped by the population explosion. Unfor-
tunately many countries have never had a
language census; for others, reliable data are
decades old.
General anthropologists should make sure
their institutions' libraries have Classification; a
special interest in how groups are related is
probably required for investing in one's own
copy. We will see this study'simproved successor
only if funding sources continue to nurture
research along these lines.
Theory of Semiotics. Umberto Eco. Advances
in Semiotics Series. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1976. ix + 354 pp. $15.00
(cloth).
Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs.
Thomas A. Sebeok. Studies in Semiotics, 5.
Bloomington: Research Center for Language
and Semiotic Studies, Indiana University;Lisse,
The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder, 1976. xiii +
271 pp. n.p. (paper).
W. C. Watt
University of California, Irvine
Rightly or wrongly, many anthropologists
continue to find something fishy about
semiotics. Until recently the field invited this at-
titude, I think, by appearing to be at the same
time so broad and so thin: semiotics took all
signaling to be its province, but, rather like a
labor organizer, it seemed to spend more time
specifying who was in the Union than perform-
ing useful work. Something that passed notice,
during this period, was that semiotics was
beginning to ask some deep and far-reaching
questions, the most fundamental of these deal-
ing with the nature and putative universalityof
semiotic behavior itself: the interchange of
signals. Something else that passed notice was
that, given its somewhat peculiar parentage,
semiotics might have been expected to suffer a
few birth pangs. That this first phase of
development can now be seen in its true light is
 LINGUISTICS
due largely to the two books under review; and
these same books, having completed the period
of consolidating the field's philosophical bases,
fittingly inaugurate Phase Two, from which
much is anticipated.
As Sebeok makes clear, the field now called
"semiotics" represents the coalescence of two
earlier disciplines, one of which, alas, was also
called "semiotics." For our present purposes,
let's call the latter "P-semiotics,"memorializing
its founder, Charles S. S. Peirce. Both P-semio-
tics and semiology, the other ancestral disci-
pline, were concerned with the universal prop-
erties of "signs" but they differed radically on
which aspect of signs was to be taken as of car-
dinal interest. True to its philosophical origins,
P-semiotics concerned itself with the various
ways in which signs relate their signifiers (e.g.,
morphemes) to their significata (e.g.,
meanings); while true to its origins in the work
of Ferdinand de Saussure, semiology mostly
concerned itself with the properties that bind
sign to sign in a governing system (or language).
What united the two disciplines, besides their
focus on the sign, was the conviction that signs
(and signaling activities) were to be found
throughout human behavior, rather than just in
language. It was predictable that the two would
unite (though, of course, both P-semiotics and
semiology have also continued independent ex-
istences, the latter often under the banner of
"structuralism").
The books under review make these lines of
development and of convergence perfectly
clear. The Saussurean (semiological/structural-
ist) viewpoint was mostly oblivious to the fact
that signs differ in how they tie signifier and
significatum, for to Saussure the great bulk of
linguistic signs, indeed all signs of lasting in-
terest, were "immotiv&,"that is, they consisted
of a signifier associated arbitrarily with its
significatum. In contrast the Peircean viewpoint
stressed the complex ways in which a sign could
be "motiv&,"ranging from zero motivation (the
conventional linguistic sign, or "symbol")
through topological motivation (as when a blue-
print models a building) to replicative motiva-
tion (as when a photograph directly imitates its
subject). Not surprisingly, perhaps, these two
partners in present-day semiotics lie in uneasy
union, with the apolinguistic flavor of the
Saussurean branch sometimes viewed with
alarm by the more Peircean advocates (Eco, p.
176), while the more philosophical tinge of the
Peircean camp strikes many as leaving the hard
work of empirical verification to other hands (as
see above). What is more important than these
sectarian disagreements is that most semioticists
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715
now view the two once-separate strands as com-
plementary and as interwoven. In any case the
history of modern semiotics constitutes an in-
teresting chapter in the intellectual history of
the social sciences, a chapter which for once,
thanks mostly to Sebeok's new collection of
papers, has been done justice to.
Both books show leanings toward P-semiotics,
though neither Eco nor Sebeok seems to have
any particular ax to grind. Eco refines and
deepens Peirce's descriptions of signs and sign-
functions, while Sebeok broadens the notion of
"signifying"to cover behavior undreampt of in
Peirce's philosophy. Having demonstrated that
semiotics is historically constrained to grant
some standing to the "signifying" of physical
ailments by outward symptoms, Sebeok argues
that the field is also obliged to admit, into one
of its remoter provinces called "endosemiotics,"
the signaling function of the genetic code itself
(esp. pp. 108 fn.). Few, I think, will want to
broaden semiotics further; but anyone inclined
to dismiss "endosemiotics"out of hand would do
well to reread Sebeok's brief, for once it is
granted that creatures on the order of bees use
signs, the notion that the very lowest living
creatures--organic molecules - use them too no
longer taxes one's credulity. Sebeok's territorial
challenge, in any event, has the distinct merit of
requiring for its disproof rigorous argument in a
domain which, though potentially of great in-
terest, has heretofore lain fallow.
It is Sebeok's own view, incidentally, that
human language is set well apart from all other
sorts of semiotic systems, so that by inference
the more apolinguistic approaches, for nonlin-
guistic systems, are to be discommended. This
reservationserves as a useful caution; but on the
other hand, just as with extending the domain
of semiotics itself, extending the "linguistic"
analogy as far as it will go has historical necessi-
ty on its side. What's more, it is important to
continue to insist on the importance of semiotic
systems. For if it sometimes seems that (say)
L6vi-Strauss, the most notable present-day ad-
vocate of Saussureanprinciples, bears down too
heavily on his "systemsof oppositions," insisting
on "meanings"of varying plausibility, we might
remind ourselvesof his ability thus to illuminate
the murkier reaches of symbolic behavior. Such
illuminations seem to come about especially
when he surpasses his Saussurean antecedents
and discusses not just the system of symbols and
the system of the entities they stand for, but also
the (partial) mapping of the one onto the other.
Here I'm thinking particularly of his 1963 study
of totemism, whose fundamental point is surely
that what matters is less what totems are taken
716 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
by which tribal subdivision individually, as how
the relations among the totemic entities (chiefly
animals) map onto the relations among the
totem-bearers: what similarities and differences
are preserved on both levels.
LUvi-Strauss is occasionally accused of being
overly abstract, but it is precisely at this level of
abstraction, it strikes me, that further work on
the systemic or apolinguistic side of modern
semiotics is most needed, and promises the most
payoff. Here, as well as in the ever-deepening
study of the ways in which signifiers signify, is
where Phase Two should begin to produce a
solid body of empirical work. What the two
books under review succeed in doing is extend-
ing and firmly consolidating the discipline's
foundation, making the case for its central posi-
tion within the study of culture, and whetting
one's appetite for future developments. Each
book, in its own way, is seminal.
Speech Play: Research and Resources for
Studying Linguistic Creativity. Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ed. Publications in Con-
duct and Communication. Erving Goffman and
Dell Hymes, gen. eds. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1976. xii + 307 pp.
$15.00 (cloth).
Zdenek Salzmann
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The essence of speech play is purposeful
manipulation of linguistic elements and rela-
tions beyond the range of ordinary language
use. If process and outcome are considered the
opposing poles on a continuum representing
varieties of discourse, then speech play would
align with the former, purely instrumental talk
with the latter, and verbal art and conversation
would fit somewhere between the two extremes.
To indulge in speech play is to engage in
linguistic creativity. While the specification of
the nature of linguistic playfulness is likely to
vary from one culture or community to the
next, the phenomenon itself is doubtless univer-
sal. This volume elucidates the concept and the
nature of speech play from several vantage
points and is a welcome contribution to the
rapidly growing literature on ethnography of
speaking.
The main body of the text consists of three
parts concerned, respectively, with speech play
as language structure, the acquisition of speech
play, and individual and institutional creativity.
The remainder of the volume (pp. 175-284),
contributed by the editor, includes a three-page
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[80, 1978]
discussion of directions for future research; a
helpful bibliographic guide to general folklore
literature but particularly to works dealing with
speech play in the broadest sense (pp. 179-223);
and a bibliography of some twelve hundred
items, covering works referred to throughout
the volume as well as a number of additional
ones. Aside from the introduction, written
jointly with Joel Sherzer, the editor has also
coauthored the book's longest chapter, dealing
with children's traditional speech play and child
language (pt. 2, pp. 65-110). The aim of this
chapter, the other author of which is Mary San-
ches, is to show that certain characteristics of
children's speech play may be derived from
modern models of language acquisition. One of
the authors' findings is that speech play in
children serves as the proving ground for the
verbal art which they may later display as
adults.
In "Play Languages: Implications for (Socio)
Linguistics" Joel Sherzer illustrates with ex-
amples from several Cuna, French, and Java-
nese play languages the different linguistic rules
that generate them. His most important general
observation is that the structural properties of
these special codes may well serve as clues for
the syllabic structure, the abstract representa-
tion of sounds, and the classification of mor-
phemes and words in those languages from
which they derive. The other two articles of part
1, by Richard and Sally Price and Victoria R.
Bricker, deal, respectively, with the major
operational principles of disguise in the secret
play languages of a Caribbean Creole and jok-
ing strategies in Zinacanteco. Both are rich in
data, but neither explicitly touches on some of
the broader questions raised by Sherzer.
Part 2 contains two contributions in addition
to the article already mentioned. In one of
these, Brian Sutton-Smith attempts to classify a
sample of 316 riddles collected from grade
school children of several small towns in north-
western Ohio. The author's approach combines
developmental and structural criteria: he shows
how specific semantic devices correlate with the
chronological ages of the young riddlers. The
second article, "Verbal Dueling in Chamula" by
Gary H. Gossen, presents a sociolinguistic de-
scription and analysis of "truly frivolous talk,"
an important genre of a Chiapas Highlands
community.
The first of the two articles of part 3 is a
description by Anthony E. Backhouse of Japa-
nese number mnemonics. These aids to
memory, based on both phonology and ortho-
graphy, are widely used for a variety of practical
purposes by certain segments of Japanese socie-